Anna Karenina eBook

“Suppose I make the attempt. What does
it mean?” she said, evidently giving utterance
to a thought, a thousand times thought over and learned
by heart. “It means that I, hating him,
but still recognizing that I have wronged him—­and
I consider him magnanimous—­that I humiliate
myself to write to him.... Well, suppose I make
the effort; I do it. Either I receive a humiliating
refusal or consent.... Well, I have received
his consent, say...” Anna was at that moment
at the furthest end of the room, and she stopped there,
doing something to the curtain at the window.
“I receive his consent, but my...my son?
They won’t give him up to me. He will
grow up despising me, with his father, whom I’ve
abandoned. Do you see, I love... equally, I
think, but both more than myself—­two creatures,
Seryozha and Alexey.”

She came out into the middle of the room and stood
facing Dolly, with her arms pressed tightly across
her chest. In her white dressing gown her figure
seemed more than usually grand and broad. She
bent her head, and with shining, wet eyes looked from
under her brows at Dolly, a thin little pitiful figure
in her patched dressing jacket and nightcap, shaking
all over with emotion.

“It is only those two creatures that I love,
and one excludes the other. I can’t have
them together, and that’s the only thing I want.
And since I can’t have that, I don’t care
about the rest. I don’t care about anything,
anything. And it will end one way or another,
and so I can’t, I don’t like to talk of
it. So don’t blame me, don’t judge
me for anything. You can’t with your pure
heart understand all that I’m suffering.”
She went up, sat down beside Dolly, and with a guilty
look, peeped into her face and took her hand.

“What are you thinking? What are you thinking
about me? Don’t despise me. I don’t
deserve contempt. I’m simply unhappy.
If anyone is unhappy, I am,” she articulated,
and turning away, she burst into tears.

Left alone, Darya Alexandrovna said her prayers and
went to bed. She had felt for Anna with all her
heart while she was speaking to her, but now she could
not force herself to think of her. The memories
of home and of her children rose up in her imagination
with a peculiar charm quite new to her, with a sort
of new brilliance. That world of her own seemed
to her now so sweet and precious that she would not
on any account spend an extra day outside it, and
she made up her mind that she would certainly go back
next day.

Anna meantime went back to her boudoir, took a wine
glass and dropped into it several drops of a medicine,
of which the principal ingredient was morphine.
After drinking it off and sitting still a little
while, she went into her bedroom in a soothed and
more cheerful frame of mind.